Coming Soon to a Voting Booth near You? The Paper Trail

Do you know what kind of voting machines you’ll be using in November? Do they have a paper trail? Do you want a paper trail? Don’t know? Read this and find out.

Six years and counting

After the election fiasco of 2000, Congress passed the Help Americans Vote Act, a piece of legislation meant to fix the glitches in our voting system.

The bill allotted $3.9 billion dollars for election reforms in all 50 states. Only $2.9 billion have been spent and not all of the reforms have been made.

Most of the responsibility for election reform falls on the states, and each state has progressed at a different rate. Some states, including California, Ohio, and Connecticut, have direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines and laws that require a physical record of each vote or, a voter-verified paper trail. Others have the machines but no paper-trail requirement, and eight states have neither.

Look up your state here.

Suing the state

Voters in Pennsylvania are suing the state over electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail.

The group, made up of both Democrats and Republicans, alleges that the current machines, certified by Secretary of State Pedro A. Cortés for use in 57 counties, violate the state constitution and election code. This point is in question.

The non-partisan group hopes that the court will grant an injunction and direct the state to use paper ballots in November.

The plaintiffs’ attorney, Mary Kohast, asserts that the integrity of the election process is at stake, saying that the computerized voting machines are subject to tampering and malfunction and that, without a paper trail, hundreds or even thousands of votes could be lost.

The paper trail movement

In 2003, a group of concerned computer science professors from Stanford began to argue that computerized voting machines should have a paper-audit component. One of the most outspoken of the group, Professor David Dill, was consequently placed on a task force for election reform and succeeded in convincing then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley (D) of the importance of a paper trail.

What do we do with the paper records?

The question of what to do with paper records has people arguing as well.

Twenty-five states have laws demanding that voters verify and then hand over to election officials a paper ballot, and 16 of those require that the paper "receipts" be considered in the case of any recount. Laws in Nevada and Idaho on the other hand stipulate that the electronic ballots, not the paper audit, should be used.

For advocates of the paper trail, using paper ballots to recount makes sense because the paper representation of the ballot is well understood, and hey, why not use them when you went to all this trouble?

But those opposed say that recounting paper ballots is too time-consuming, especially since they must be hand counted, as there is no machine to process them by the thousands like punch-card ballots.

What do you think?

Do you think a paper trail is necessary? How should recounts be conducted? What’s the situation in your state and how does it compare with what you’d like to see on Election Day? Have you ever walked away from the voting booth and wondered if your vote was counted?

You can still affect change by going to your local election boards to complain. Or, volunteer in November and help the process to go more smoothly.

Your input matters

Your representatives DO care what you think. Especially now -- 2006 is an election year and many representatives will be looking to reconnect with their constituents. Let your congressmen and women know what you think! Give your senators a piece of your mind! To find your reps, click here.

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